The Boy Turns One

My sweet, special boy.

He gives open-mouthed, slobbery kisses.

He is constantly "singing."

He eats paper when he thinks I'm not looking.

He is a snuggler, despite being in near-constant motion.

He says a small number of key words, the most important, of course, being "Mama."

He blows kisses.

He giggles like a maniac when his sister does something silly.

He kisses the pages of his books.

He is very ticklish.

He slyly initiates games of chase, silly songs with hand actions, and peekaboo.

He loves food, and eats anything and everything, despite having only two teeth and the tiniest tip of a third just cutting through.

He is already extremely cheeky.

He can throw a ball like nobody's business, and he gets down on his belly to search for it under furniture.

He walks toward me, arms above his head, and then hurls himself the last foot or so, confident that I will always catch him. 

He is pure joy. 

And on August 14th, he turned one.  We celebrated at a cottage in Ontario, where we were visiting with family (more on that in an upcoming post).

That's a carrot cake with cream cheese icing and his name spelled out in raisins.  With mama love baked right in.

Big sister helped blow out the candles.

 

And was excited to see him take his first bite.

You could say he liked it.

And he wasn't the only one.

It was a bittersweet moment in time for me. It is incredibly fulfilling to watch my children grow, but to see my baby looking more like a toddler made me a little nostalgic for the teeny, tiny, snuggly newborn days.  (Minus the sleep deprivation, of course.) Ah, such is the plight of motherhood.

Am I right in assuming that I'm not alone in this?  Do children's birthday parties make you feel a little wistful too?

The Great Big Baby-Led Weaning Post, Part 1

When Lilah was six months to a year old, you could often find me in the kitchen, boiling, pureeing, and freezing organic fruits and veggies to serve to her at mealtimes.  Sound familiar?

This time around, as Henry approached the six month mark, I knew I would have neither the time, nor the desire (and certainly not the energy!) to spend his precious naptimes boiling and pureeing away.  I wanted to make starting solids as painless as possible for all of us.  So I started looking into Baby-Led Weaning (BLW), also known as Baby-Led Feeding or Self-Feeding.  I knew a number of families who had tried this method for feeding solids, often with their second or third babies, and I was interested to know what it entailed. 

Now that I'm the one doing it and posting photos all over Instagram and Facebook, I've had several friends ask me about it, and I am more than happy to share my experiences.

There are some good resources on the internet, including the Baby-Led Weaning site, Baby Center Canada and Canadian Family. But there aren't a lot of specifics out there, mainly because the idea with BLW is that pretty much anything goes.  You kind of have to wing it, which can be a bit challenging for those of us who are admitted control freaks.  And I think that would be especially true for first-time parents. 

Even this time around, it felt like a bit of a leap of faith, given that Henry's diet had consisted exclusively of breast milk up until he turned six months.  I had been intimately acquainted with every drop of sustenance that had passed his lips, and now I was about to plop some food down on the tray of his high chair and let him go to work on it.

But, when it comes to babies, I have always tried to consider how things would have been done back in the bad old days, before high chairs and blenders and fortified baby cereals and the onslaught of parenting information with which we are bombarded every. single. day.

So I let him go for it.  But that's not to say that I didn't have a preliminary checklist to ensure safety and my own confidence in this practice.

 

First off, my research indicated that babies should be able to sit unassisted before starting self-feeding.  Henry was able to sit up by himself by five and a half months.  Check.  He was showing a definite interest in the foods on our plates and started to get a little peeved when everyone around him was eating without him.  Even when we sat him up in his high chair with toys to entertain him while the rest of us ate dinner. Check.  I still waited until he turned six months, though.  Just to be sure.

I also talked to our family doctor about my plans.  Her resident, who I initially told about my interest in BLW, brought up concerns about Henry's iron levels when I said I was planning to skip fortified cereals.  But then I talked it through with our doctor, mentioning my concerns about him becoming constipated, the way Lilah did on fortified cereals, given that he was already one of those legendary, exclusively-breast-fed-once-a-week poopers. The bottom line of our conversation was that fortified baby cereals are not actually a necessary step, and you can introduce meat and dark, leafy greens quite early on, if you are concerned about baby's iron levels.  (Which, I'll be honest, I really wasn't.)  Again, I go back to the days of our ancestors.  Somehow, billions of babies have survived and even thrived without iron-fortified baby cereals or iron supplements.  Gasp!

There are plenty of reasons to try BLW, but here are a few of the reasons I decided to do this with Henry:

-I'm lazy.
-It seemed like a natural progression from breastfeeding.
-There are some studies that show it encourages babies to grow into children who make healthy choices and are in touch with their satiety cues.
-I had a hunch it would make family mealtimes easier, less stressful, and more inclusive.
-Cavemen didn't have blenders or fortified baby cereals.
-Fine motor development.
-Did I mention I'm lazy?

It turns out I have a lot to say on the subject of BLW, so I've divided it up into segments to make it a little more digestible.  (Haha, get it?)

***Stay tuned for the next installment of this post.  I'll give the specifics on what foods we started with and how it all went.***

Please share your own experiences with feeding babies - I'd love to hear about them!

Wordless Wednesday: Bath Time

(If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have seen this shot already.  But I thought it bared repeating. Heh, see what I did there?)

Happy Wednesday!

Life with Young Kids - The Truth

I just couldn't pass up this week's Monday Listicles topic, "10 photos from life with kids."  I have a number of friends who are on the verge of becoming parents or have recently had babies and I thought I'd take this opportunity to impart a few words of wisdom.  You're welcome!

Truths about life with young kids: 

You know how, when you look at other people's kids, and they have snot running down their upper lip and food all over their face, and you think, "I will NEVER let my kids walk around like that?"  The thing is, you will.  And you'll find them irresistibly adorable, even when their noses are snotty and they're covered in sticky food debris.  Sometimes even more so.

They'll give you this look. Frequently.

photo by Adam Schwartz

But then this look will follow closely on its heels, and you'll forget everything else, at least for a few minutes.

They'll come at you like this, especially when you're wearing something brand new and/or white.

They'll try to steal your beer. And your keys. And your phone. The TV remote.  And occasionally your dignity.

photo by Adam Schwartz

You will spend far too many hours of your life trying to dissuade them from eating dirt/sand/gravel/rocks, drinking from dirty sesspools, and generally endangering themselves and others.  It's kind of exhausting.

You will do whatever you can to help them pursue their interests, even when those change more often than their clothes.

They'll make you see the world through new eyes.

They'll make you see their co-creator through new eyes.

They'll teach you more about yourself than you learned in the entire first thirty-odd years of your life before they came along.

The truth?  The truth is, life with kids, while beautiful and fulfilling, is also messy, chaotic, and quite often even uncomfortable. Let's face it, it ain't all unicorns and rainbows. But we parents must be eternal optimists. (Either that, or complete fools.) Because somehow, the unicorn-rainbow moments are the ones that stay with us.

...And the Livin' is Easy...

 

 

Photo by Adam Schwartz

 Happy summertime, friends!

   

"What's With the Band-Aid?"

You may have noticed something conspicuous and pink on Lilah's forehead in her birthday party pictures.  If you guessed princess Band-Aid, you are correct.  And it's not just for show, unfortunately.

On Friday morning, the day before her birthday party and two days after her fourth birthday, the incident occurred.  I was attempting to make going to the bathroom into a game, since it is something Lilah often resists and it can sometimes take a dramatic turn.  But in my attempt to avoid a big upset, I created even more drama.  I had scooped her up and was playfully stomping towards the bathroom with her in my arms when I heard a sickening thud.  Forehead meeting sharp corner of a wall, Mama's heart in her stomach.

I knew as soon as I saw it that it would probably need stitches.  So off we went to the emergency room at BC Children's.  The final tally was three stitches, two stickers, two popsicles, one plastic fairy wand and one very sorry mama. 

*Warning: the photos below show the cut quite clearly, so if you're squeamish about blood, skip right on down to the comments.

 

Thankfully, she forgave me almost right away.  I took a little longer to get to a place of self-forgiveness, but I'm pretty much there now. 

 

The stitches came out today, and now all that's left is to protect the scar from the sun for, oh, pretty much the rest of her life!

 

 



Four Years in the Making

 
Sometimes, when I take her in, my eyes scanning the familiar lines of her face, shoulders, hands, and long, lean, limbs, my brain registers a vague shock at how much she has grown in four years.  And in her growth, I see my own, exponential in comparison. 

Her now four-year-old spirit thirsts for learning, and she laps up the small drops of knowledge I can impart, not knowing how much she is teaching me in the process.

From that earth-shattering moment on July 3, 2009 (1:31 am, to be exact) when I became a mother for the first time, I have been challenged, stretched, and pushed far beyond what I thought were my limits.  And, as always, with growth and learning come the realization of how little we really know and just how much growth and learning are still possible.

To my big girl who is gradually bringing out the bigness in me,

Happy fourth birthday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Signs of Summer

 Happy birthday Canada!  And what a beautiful long weekend to kick off the beginning of summer.  I don't want to jinx it, but it really feels as though summer has finally arrived in Vancouver. 

 

It's in buckets full of ripe, juicy BC strawberries, 

Epic sunsets,

Cooling off at the spray park,

And playing outside.

It's in toes (and hands) sinking into lush, green grass,

Legs tired from pushing pedals,

And water play in the golden evening light.

And also?  It's deep in a glass of chilled white wine sipped while sitting on the patio after the kids have collapsed, exhausted, into their beds.  And on that note...

Happy Monday!  What does summer mean to you?

Happenings

Last ballet class.

Last gymnastics class.

Strawberry picking.

 

 

"Junuary" in Vancouver is almost over, and summer is coming - I can feel it!

Up in the Air